Endoscopes are used with increasing frequency in operating rooms. They have facilitated the growth of new minimally invasive procedures that allow surgery to be done through small openings into internal body cavities created by trocars and into external body cavities through the mouth and anus. The vision necessary to do minimally invasive surgery is accomplished by inserting endoscopes equipped with video cameras (video endoscopes) that display full motion images on a video monitor. These monitors are placed near the operative field where the surgeon can see them.
Although video endoscopes and the associated equipment help facilitate these minimally invasive procedures there are several factors about these systems that are currently undesirable. The most important are; i) the bulk of the equipment that is necessary to create and display the images and their proximity to the operative site and ii) the location and number of interconnecting elements. Traditional endoscopes require the use of a collection of electronic components commonly referred to as a video tower. This rack of equipment includes several electronic components that provide functions such as: processing of video signals from the camera, supplying power to the tower-based equipment and the camera, supplying visible light energy to the endoscope and displaying the video images to the surgeon. The video endoscope itself is connected to this video tower through a camera wire and an optical fiber bundle that serves as a light transmission source. This optical fiber bundle is necessary to carry light from the tower-based source to the endoscope. Due to the light losses inherent to the optical fiber bundle, they are typically no longer than six feet. The lengths of these interconnecting cables require that the video tower be forced to be in the footprint of the operative site. Using current technology, the video tower takes up significant space near the patient and the operating room staff. In addition, the optical fiber bundles heavy enough to which make the endoscope hard to manage.
As minimally invasive instruments become more advanced there is a drive to create instruments that go through smaller ports, and thus leave smaller wounds in the patient. Video Endoscopes must keep pace with this decrease in cross section.
Because of these drawbacks in the traditional video endoscope systems, there have been new designs that have tried to remove as many of the external equipment in the system as are possible. This would take equipment out of the footprint of the operative area. One example includes scope designs that remove the external light source from the video endoscope systems. In, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,908,294 by Schick et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 6,190,309 by Ooshima et al white light sources, specifically white light emitting diodes (LEDs), are placed at the distal end of the video endoscope to provide illumination to the operative site. This arrangement eliminates the need to have an external light source or a fiber optic cable. Because the light sources in this embodiment are placed distal to the camera itself and must still be within the cross section of the instrument, Video endoscopes so configured do not have the ability to view axially, as would be needed in endoscopic procedures. In this embodiment, only video endoscopes that view in directions away from the axis of the shaft of the instrument are possible. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,908,294 by Schick et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 6,190,309 by Ooshima et al.
An improved video endoscope system would be one that removes the need for external equipment such as light sources and the associated connection cables, while still allowing the video endoscope to view axially relative to the shaft of the instrument. A further advantage of an improved video endoscope system would be one that had an entirely wireless design enabled by operation from battery power supplies and video data communications via modulated electromagnetic energy or modulated visible or invisible light. Such a system would have no need for support equipment within the footprint of the operative area except for the compatible video data receiver and a display monitor.